Category Archives: Self-Publishing

Silly me… I should have notified folks that I was back from my holiday break.

Well, now I am officially doing so, and I have a new offering for writers who are looking for developmental editing on their manuscripts only—writers new to self-publishing and authors of first books may particularly need this.

So, for developmental editing only you will pay a flat rate of $300 for fiction. Should you need additional copyediting as well, please take advantage of my Hot Combo (see the Rates page).

Fiction only, please!

I will provide suggestions and constructive feedback on issues like style, dialogue, narrative flow, and pacing via the comment feature in Microsoft Word. I’ll suggest cuts if necessary, but more often I’ll point to areas where fleshing out the scene will be helpful.

Typically, I can turn around a job like this in a week. Let me know when you query what your preferred turnaround time is.

New book alert: Author, therapist, and spiritual healer Mytrae Meliana used Edit for Indies for copyediting and proofreading on her powerful, transformative memoir Brown Skin Girl: An Indian-American Woman’s Magical Journey from Broken to Beautiful.

I’m very pleased to see that the book is flourishing in its Amazon categories, and is available through Kindle Unlimited. Any woman who has struggled with abuse and control issues in their family of origin will resonate with this story of healing.

We’ve had VERY unusual weather for the Bay Area this week — it was 97 degrees in San Francisco yesterday, and a similar temperature today. I’m wishing I was at the seaside with a bucket and spade!

My spring sale was good. A new client called B.W. McKay had me copyedit two of his long books. He writes African American fiction, concentrating on young black male “professional” protagonists who are outwardly successful but inwardly stressed, taking the reader back to their tough adolescences to see the roots of their issues. I really liked both of his novels and have put the link to his novel Digging Deep Within on my Indie Author Showcase page.

To encourage business in these sultry summer months, I’m offering a 10 percent discount across the board on both copyediting and proofreading, whether you are a new client or not, starting now. Just mention the summer sale when you query me! Ends August 31, 2019.

I’m lucky to have great clients find me for copy editing or proofreading. I wanted to briefly mention a couple of books that I really enjoyed working on recently.

East Coast writer Lucy J. Madison is a new author to me, but she has published several lesbian romances, including Personal Foul, a sports romance. I was lucky enough to edit her latest, A Recipe for Love, which is currently on pre-order. Set in upstate New York, this book tells the tale of Danika Russo, a woman in middle-age who has worked for thirty years as a mail carrier and just retired, having taken care of her partner while she died of cancer and her father as well. Now she has inherited an ugly house, filled with reminders of her unhappy childhood.

Books which show characters gradually becoming unstuck are particularly appealing to me. This slow, simmering burn of a book shows Danika taking steps outside of her comfort zone, including daring to start a relationship with a younger woman, Finn, who seems attracted but strangely elusive. The Italian cooking class Danika attends, which could have been a cliché, brought a great zest to the book. And there are recipes at the end! I love an unconventional romance, so this book is recommended.

Frank Tayell is an author whom I wouldn’t personally have discovered if it were not for my work with him. He has a long-running series of post-apocalyptic novels called Surviving the Evacuation. (He reached out to me halfway through this series.) Since Tayell is UK-based, the novels are sometimes a challenge to proofread because part of my job is to preserve the British-English spelling (while flagging anything that seems too untranslatable).

Working on a book at my level of focus means entering another author’s mind and world, to a certain extent. I rather like Tayell’s world, where the cerebral characters are pushing to survive, looking forward to the tenuous future, and striving to preserve social order and human decency as best they can while they move restlessly around the English (and now French) countryside in search of a stable refuge. And yes, there’s plenty of zombie-killing, but I doubt anyone really reads these books solely for this particular feature. It doesn’t surprise me that Tayell has loyal fans who have followed the series through all fourteen books!

Love, sex, and violence appeal to readers, but a really well-written book can transcend genre. My job is to help each independent author achieve their vision, making sure that jarring inconsistencies are smoothed away. It can be as easy as changing mandolin, a musical instrument, to mandoline, a grater (in a cooking context) or filling in missing words, usually pronouns, that the author has dropped in his or her haste. The trick is to stay attentive to the language and never approach the editing of the book in a purely mechanical way.

Let me know if I can help with your editing or proofreading needs in the next few months!

The birthday cake in the pic marks Edit for Indies‘ first five years in existence! I realized when I looked at my records just now that I did my first real freelance job under the Edit for Indies name in May 2012. I have also recently passed invoice #300, another milestone!

It is true that the self-publishing scene has changed a lot in the last five years. Some wonderful outfits have gone out of business (Self-Publishing Roundtable, for example), while small presses that once flourished have fallen by the wayside, most notably All Romance eBooks but also including Samhain.

To generalize, it seems as if most indie authors at this point are either doing quite well or are feeling discouraged about their prospects. There isn’t very much upward momentum except for people who carefully plan out their series and write to market in a small number of categories. There are also shady promoters out there…a recent lengthy thread on Kboards.com entitled “Box Set Scams” reinforces this point.

I want to thank the loyal clients who have stuck with me this far. Thanks for your trust in my work, and I look forward to working with some old AND new faces in 2017!

Hasn’t this year gone fast? We are definitely in late fall/early winter mode here in the Bay Area. And a long, rainy El Nino winter lies ahead for us.

Edit for Indies has been working on some interesting titles, most notably Croatian writer Goran Visic‘s fast-paced and sinister thriller Blood in Bellavar. This novel will hopefully find a wide audience.

I wanted to share a couple of items that may be of interest to independent authors. First of all, Mark Coker of Smashwords wrote a blog post about Dan Poynter‘s recent death. Poynter was a man who championed self-publishing (particularly nonfiction), back when it was considered odd and not very respectable, with his company ParaPublishing. I met him once, at a conference in the early ’90s, and he was kind in a brusque, no-nonsense sort of way to this young editorial assistant. He definitely had lots of know-how about print and marketing, and wanted to share it. Here’s Mark Coker’s post.

I also wanted to share the latest Fussy Librarian newsletter, which offers not only some hard-earned wisdom about why, and when, you should quit your job, but also contains info about the very intriguing Wishing Shelf Book Awards. I hadn’t heard of this UK-based book award, but it sounds hands-on and genuinely useful to indie writers.